[over]reacting to the "prosperity gospel"

It’s easy (not to mention hip) to hate on advocates of the “prosperity gospel,” who teach that God promises people health, wealth, and a “good life” if they trust in him. It’s right to react against the “prosperity gospel,” but we should be wary of going “too far,” as it’s equally easy to do. The prosperity gospel errors by placing our happiness at the center of God’s intentions for us, and it portrays God orbiting around us, when we orbit around him. God’s greatest concern isn’t our experience of life but his glory filling the cosmos. God’s overarching concern for us isn’t our happiness but our holiness, and his work in our lives is geared towards our holiness and his glory. When we demolish the tenets of the prosperity gospel by erecting in its place a “gospel of suffering,” we’re no less guilty of misconstruing the gospel. It’s wrong for us to believe that God’s biggest concern is giving us a comfortable, rose-garden experience on our march to consummation, and it’s just as wrong to deny that God gives us gifts and blessings along the way, for Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.

A good, loving father has his child’s best interests in mind and seeks to train his child to become a decent human being through reproof, correction, discipline, and encouragement. God, as a good and loving Father, seeks to train us into being decent human beings. The New Testament is adamant that God’s desire for his people is for them to be conformed to the image of his Son, Jesus Christ; Jesus Christ is portrayed, in the New Testament, as the model human being, setting the template, so-to-speak, for what genuine human living looks like. Conformity to Christ (becoming “like Christ”) is becoming, by the power of the Spirit and human diligence, a new sort of person in the world, a redeemed and ransomed sort of person, the kind of person who lives life as God intended it to be lived. Holy living is genuine, fully-flourishing life as God’s image-bearers, and this is God’s ultimate concern for us—and it is both for his glory and for our benefit. Because he is a loving father, he employs reproof, correction, and discipline to goad us in the right direction, to keep us on track. For [our parents] disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but God disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share his holiness. We have his grace and mercy meeting us in our weakness and failures, for a good Father is patient, too.

A good, loving father trains his children into righteousness, and he gives good gifts to his children, too. The priority is holiness, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t give his children gifts, temporal as they may be. To deny this is to say that those “good gifts” aren’t gifts at all, but flukes. To call them flukes is to blind ourselves to the gifts he gives, and it cultivates an ungrateful heart: when a father gives a gift, and his child denies the source and sees it as a random, chance occurrence, this hurts the father’s heart. But when we’re grateful and thankful, acknowledging the source of the gift, we bring joy to our father. God enjoys giving gifts to his children: Jesus said as much, and the New Testament affirms it without making these gifts the point. The point remains conformity to Christ, holy living, being set apart in the world. The problem with the “prosperity gospel” could even be drawn out to a focus on the gifts as well as the misperception of God as, first and foremost, a father who dotes on his children. God does enjoy blessing us, does enjoy giving us good gifts, but that’s not his biggest concern. His chief aim isn’t to give us a “good life” but to make us “good people.”

The Bible is clear: those who pursue Christ-likeness, who take holiness seriously, these people find themselves more apt to experience and receive the temporal gifts of God. This isn’t some sort of transaction, weighing our holiness on a scale so that we can reap more and more gifts. When children consistently disobey, rebel, or fail to heed their father’s discipline, the father’s energies are focused on what matters most: holiness. When a child heeds discipline and pursues holiness, such a child opens herself up to receive more blessings, since she’s able to truly appreciate them and won’t abuse them. God isn’t seeking our holiness so that he can dote upon his with abandon once we reach a certain point on the “holiness meter.” Our lives should be lived with holiness and devotion to God as our first aim, and along the way we are to enjoy God’s gifts and be thankful for them without putting our hopes in these gifts and without falling prey to the egocentric idea that these gifts are what it’s all about. God’s concern for us is our holiness, and it’s for our benefit and his glory. We orbit around him, not the other way around.